In society today there are many glacial forces at work, cutting and shaping a new future. Understanding these forces and the changes they bring has always given us the upper hand, allowing us to adapt and embrace to the new norm. Some changes however have left society in distress as we now experience. Resent changes in the earth’s climate have given way to the theory of global warming threating the world with social unrest and environmental disasters. As whole countries, cultures, races and governments fall victim to this global epidemic, we can understand how these different groups deal with, view and understand global warming as it pertains to sociology. Global warming has just recently come to the attention of our government as it poses a threat to our national and international welfare and wellbeing. As we can look at political parties with in our American government and see what factors have separated their ideas and beliefs that pertain to global climate change. The first is the Democratic party and or liberals who are consistently found to be more pro-environmental than their Republican and conservative counterparts (Dunlap & McCright 2001). With local environmental problems such as water and air pollution, global environmental problems like climate change pose a stronger challenge to conservatives’ beliefs in capitalism and uninterrupted economic progress (Jacques 2006).More specifically, the possibility of regulations to cut down greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming, is viewed as a direct threat to economic growth, the spread of free markets, national sovereignty, all thing that conservatives fight for. As a result, conservatives and Republicans can be expected to question the scientific fact and theory correlating to climate change. On the other hand, liberals and Democrats can be expected to accommodate evidence of climate change in the necessity of dealing with it, employing governmental regulations and forming new laws in an effort to reduce the danger of climate change to the lives of citizens and improve an overall quality of living. This can be expressed as nurture vs. nature, because where republicans are unwilling to sacrifice their bottom line to eliminate and prevent possible causes of a warming climate democrats are not. Overall there has been a modest increase in the percentage of Americans who believe that the effects of global warming “have already begun to happen” since 1997, from 48 percent to 61 percent. However, this upward trend masks very divergent trends among those identifying with the two major parties. While the percentage of Democrats believing global warming is already happening has increased substantially from 46 to 76 percent, the percentage of Republicans holding this belief has declined from 47 to 41 percent. The reason for this gap between democrats and republicans lies in the in the media, but first we need to understand how people gain opposite stands towards one idea; we can look at two perspectives on how people go about this. One perspective suggests a relationship between how citizens’ identify their beliefs and their political orientations. The other perspective suggests that peoples form their opinions based on their learning capacity coupled with their basic understanding of the issue at hand. Although these tow perspectives may be very different, both of put together usually affect a person’s decision making. For instance, liberal and conservative citizens both take cues from different, organizations, and media outlets, exposing them to contradicting beliefs and attitudes on controversial issues—even as they both claim to understand the issues presented (Hindman 2009). In these controversial issues for which there is a seemingly endless interpretation available to the general public. The public makes their opinion regarding that issue relieing on their ability to process information based on what they understand as well as the different
